Okay, here's the third and final part of my extremely lengthy team breakdown, which releases me from the curse that has been put upon me. Now I am allowed to proceed with administering the game and starting on updates.
Matthew Walls (185, 15) – the second sprinter on my roster who convinced me at Piemonte to take them. After watching a bit more track cycling this year I had my eye on him a bit, and with Ackermann and Sagan going out at Bora I figured he’d be in line for increased chances even with Bennett coming back, plus now that the Olympics are done he’s going to spend a bit more time on the road. Realizing that I had overlooked the recruitment of van Poppel (who I think I read is going to do more classics than stage sprinting anyway) and the development of Meeus put him on the margins of my team in the last couple of weeks. But ultimately I kept him in as one of my last picks, it was kind of between him and Schmid to throw off the roster to make my last change and I took off Schmid instead. But if he races more and gets a bit more consistent at making it to the sprints of races, he should be good for doubling his score at least.
Antonio Tiberi (111, 15) – Had a pretty muted neo-pro year, but you can’t expect too much from a 19-year old (well most of them anyway). But he’s got a good engine (junior world TT champ) and seems to have turned that into some good victories from sustained attacks here and there… admittedly I’m not a junior racing obsessive, I’m just looking at the easily available results. But I noticed him a couple of times in races last year hanging in there longer than I thought he would, and he seems like someone who could score ok in one-days, stages, TTs and even decent placings in smaller stage races.
Oliver Naesen (324, 14) – one of six ‘double down’ riders on my team (that’s riders I picked last year as well; he joins Evenepoel, Pidcock, Sosa, Jungels and Jansen), he theoretically should get back to an 800-1000 point pace this season. If his explanation of overtraining is accurate as the main reason his season was a relative disappointment, well, that’s certainly happened before. Aging isn’t a huge concern (30 should be fine), but the increased training/output/etc of the peloton is a fear of mine, and I’m worried we might see riders from teams that are trailing in sports science (you can put quotes around that if you are clinically minded) like Lotto and Ag2r might be on the back foot for the next little while. But I generally believe in him and also like him (love those ‘factory worker to peloton’ stories), so I’ll be happy to cheer him on.
Kaden Groves (67, 13) – I have casually followed his career to know enough to feel confident that he’s fast, he had some bad luck last year (2 crashes made him miss some time, plus a DQ threw his schedule off), and he’s on a team that’s positioned to give him chances in 2022. He’s won at every level, and although a lot of his early career wins were in Asia and sometimes those don’t necessarily translate to wins in the European calendar, he’s got a decent track record.
Sacha Modolo (25, 13) – ah, my old friend. My pet pick way back in 2012, he was my most expensive and one of my least profitable riders. I think I had an attachment to his success back when a forum poster who I thought knew a lot was hyping him up when the CN forum first started. Then he got 4th in MSR in his neo pro season and I thought he was set for an upper echelon career. He’s done fine for himself, don’t get me wrong, but that’s still probably his best result (ok, Giro stage wins are good too). Anyway, in the late season when most of the big races were over, I was idly streaming a Tour of Luxembourg stage in the background when I saw him win his first race in years, score his only 25 points of the season, and break down in tears. That was a wonderful moment, and when putting together my CQ team I was thinking that a) it showed he still has some hunger for good results, which will mean he’ll still be there to play in 2022, b) but the pressure is off and the confidence is up from having a win, so that’ll allow things to flow easier, and c) he’s going to Bardiani, where it all started for him, so he’ll have lots of leadership opportunities and a ripe Italian calendar to play with. Either way, if he does win some stuff it’ll be great to dovetail my personal satisfaction with my CQ-game-related satisfaction.
Jay Vine (168, 12) – man, what a great story! The “Zwift-to-pro contract” pipeline is just being established, but it makes a certain amount of sense I suppose for a sport where physiology counts for a fair amount. But there’s so much else, like mentality, technical positioning, etc. I do think there may be some external competitive advantage to switching to cycling when you haven’t grown up on it, like maybe your focus is less obsessive which can be healthy for some. But the exact alchemy of what makes a good rider is still a very complex process. Anyway – Jay Vine. Started riding a bike (like, at all) in high school. Did enough racing that he got a feel for it and decided at 24 while on a continental team that he should really give it a go and try to make it happen. Then covid hits. Then he wins a competition that could have likely only happened in covid. 2021 is a bit of an unknown, this novelty rider on a serious team. His first race, the .Pro level Tour of Turkey, which he loses by a single second! Then a couple of anonymous stage races in Europe, and thrown into the fire at the Vuelta. Where he rides around mostly anonymously, but memorably finishes 3rd in the breakaway of the MTF stage 14 after crashing, finishing behind Bardet and Herrada but notably ahead of Pidcock and Champoussin. His second year could go either way, but those brief flashes are promising, and if finishing the Vuelta built his engine for some consistency, and a year with Alpecin improved his energy efficiency in terms of positioning, he could really take off. But even if not, he’s easy to cheer for.
Amund Grondahl Jansen (46, 12) – I picked him last year because he was such a solid under-the-radar rider prior to that (I had never taken note of him until then, but he was one of those guys that consistently placed in races to garner lots of CQ points). I figured he couldn’t have as bad luck a year as in 2020 (I don’t remember why his year was bad but I had reasons when I picked him). But then his 2021 was somehow even worse, with getting sick right at the start of the year at P-N, then a bad crash partway through the season, and nursing a herniated disk. I’m ready to bet on him again.
Tobias Foss (351, 10) – I had my eye on him, and then kind of forgot about him, thinking that maybe he didn’t really have that much room for growth at a team as stacked as Jumbo. And it’s true that in most of the races he’s been part of, he’s hardly been at the front and on camera. But he’s treated differently in the team makeup than, say, Sam Oomen, who was similarly promising a few years ago but is clearly used as a mountain domestique. He’s an Avenir winner, and they’re talking about him at the Giro as a co-leader with Dumoulin. If he gets a similar top 10 in the Giro to last year or even improves/gets more stage placing points, and progresses in the week-long races enough to, say, be on the podium of a .Pro race or two, he could double his points. I expect steady progression, but also if he has a growth spurt in terms of form he could start winning stuff.
Iuri Leitao (18, 5) – I was following track a bit closer this fall and he impressed me there. However, track cycling doesn’t always translate well to road sprinting, and also ‘sprinter for Caja Rural’ has not always led to the biggest CQ haul (I think I once picked Nelson Soto for the emerging riders game with glee at all the chances he’d have). But, although two wins and a 2nd place in the 2.2 Volta Alejanto in 2021 isn’t exactly the biggest result, it’s at least something that shows he can be up there on the road (and a couple of top 10s in Algarve). And I read a recent interview with him where he was basically like “there’s more money on the road so I’m gonna go for it”, which makes him a good calculated risk at 18 points in my mind.
Clement Berthet (114, 2) – I always like the potential of a ‘switch to road cycling’ experiment, whether it’s from another sport (Roglic, Woods, Evenepoel) or from another discipline (Evans, MvdP, all the trackies and crossers, too many to list). But that also comes with some uncertainty – Bora’s various experiments over the past couple of years haven’t borne fruit, and guys like, say, Ondrej Cink dipped in and out pretty quickly. Berthet was someone who I figured had done enough in his first year since switching from MTB to show that he had a solid baseline and wouldn’t flame out. He got some respectable placings early in the season, then several more after switching from the troubled Delko to Ag2r’s setup in August. His highest result wasn’t anything to shoot fireworks off about (14th in Poland), but it was at the only WT race he did. On top of that, he finished every race except Turkey and a small 1.1 race, and made it to the end of a bunch of late-season one-day races in groups that were respectable enough to be a few minutes behind the leaders but not enough to up his CQ price. Keep that consistency and up the level a bit as he becomes more accustomed to the peloton, and I’m hopeful of a 300+ point campaign, which I’d be happy with.
Anders Halland Johannessen (84, 1) – my second unique pick ever! Hopefully it will go better than the time I picked Vendrame the year before he actually broke out. So sure, he was not my first pick, in fact he was one of the last in the classic late-stage team-building puzzle of ‘hmm, I need a rider around x points, maybe I should take a closer look at this guy I totally haven’t dismissed yet’. For sure his bro gets more attention for the more eye-popping results, but when I looked at his results more closely, they appealed to something I have long been a sucker for in this game – a consistent baseline. From high level guys I’ve chosen like Valverde (the ur-example of this), Mollema, and Pinot to others like Oomen (a few years ago before his bad year) and the above-mentioned Berthet, I tend to default to riders who will probably be pretty good in whatever race they do, and will therefore have a good floor if not the highest ceiling. His 2021 results included top 10s in the .Pro Tour of Turkey, Avenir and the Baby Giro (as well as the 2.2 Alpes Isere Tour). Stepping up to ProTeam level, even if he turns that Turkey result into 4-5 results at the same level races, and even goes a few steps higher into the top 5 or 7, he’ll be a good pick. Looks like Uno-X is making a run for the WT, so this year they’ll want to get GC points where they can get them, and I feel like he’ll be a good soldier in that cause.
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